Archives for October 2008

Attend an Orthodox shul on Shabbat and you’ll notice that married women cover their hair, donning hats, scarves, or sometimes just an elegant slip of lace. Hat variations are endless, and to yours truly, fascinating.

In Israel, you can usually pinpoint a woman’s hashkafah, religious perspective, by noting what type of head covering she favors. I’m not up on the endless variations, but I’d love to see one of my fellow bloggers from Israel publish a photo essay on this subject.

Sadly, I am up on Hollywood, er, hashkafah in regards to millinery. Yours truly has seen way too many movies and pored over way too many Hollywood bios, autobios, and dopey coffee table tomes. What can I say, I am helpless and powerless when faced with the silver screen. Perhaps I need a support group or maybe a stint in some glamorous rehab center where I scrub floors with fallen stars and become their bestest friend and confident.

Anyhoo.

Hollywood glamor photos often featured hats—a stunning variety—and here are a few of our favorites.

In the 20’s, hats were common for men and women. Hollywood’s first tragic suicide, Olive Thomas, looks pensive in a light-as-air bonnet.

Louise Brook’s cool magnetism and burning sensualappeal are blunted by this modified cloche.

Garbo’s thin hair was never her best feature.This architectural tube with a tail frames her symmetrical features just perfectly.

Jean Harlow looks like she’s wearing anoversize yarmulke. The hat squeezes her featuresand highlights eyes which were too deep set and alwaysrequired very careful lighting.

Joan Crawford is wearing a bigquestion mark on her head that asks: Why am I posing in this wretched hat?

Anita Page almost always looked better in hats,very big hats. Here in a still from Our Modern Maidens,Page’s entire outfit relates in texture, and line. Her lovelyface is framed as beautifully as a Vermeer portrait.

Great script conference on the set of Red Dust. Left to right: director Victor Fleming, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Mary Astor.

In the spacious, well-appointed conference, I’m at the tail end of a script conference with a group of high-powered studio executives.

It’s a good meeting. The company is enthusiastic about my latest spec script.

Spec scripts are not studio assignments. Instead, I wrote it on my own time in the belief that I’d find a buyer, and thus attach myself as executive producer and reap much higher financial rewards. Owning and controlling my own scripts, though risky, is one of the best ways for a Hollywood screenwriter to control his career. My batting average with specs is, so far, pretty darn good.

The production company optioned my script almost as soon as it hit the market

Now we’re discussing a rewrite—actually, more like a polish. I also have to deal with some below-the-line budget problems. Figure out a way to cut a few million from the script and make it doable. I figure I’ll scale back on the massive action scenes and combine several locations.

The execs are a creative, experienced group. Their notes are solid. I’ve known most of them for a long time. We’ve been in Hollywood for some 20-plus years. I like and admire these execs. Always respectful of my Orthodox Judaism they go out of their way to schedule lunch meetings at kosher restaurants.

We’re all on the same page, script-wise. I’m thinking: this is fab-u-lous, we’re gonna make an excellent movie.

I’m also gripped with a huge sense of relief because the meeting did not include the standard and obligatory George Bush-is-worse-than-Hitler pre-meeting chat.

Yup, it’s all smooth and professional — until the meeting devolves into sheer lunacy.

“Okay,” announces the senior studio executive, “I just want to make sure that everyone in this room is voting for Obama.”

To the left of me a junior executive goes: “Well, sure, of course.”

To the right of me another executive nods his head up and down like a bobble and mutters: “We need Obama so badly.”

Let’s be honest, folks: I can just grunt in the affirmative and be done with the whole wretched ambush.

“Robert?”

The studio exec is smiling, all charm and fuzzy-wuzzy, but his eyes betray confusion. I mean, Hollywood is in the tank for Obama, all except for a handful of out-of-the closet Republicans and even more who dare not voice their conservative beliefs for fear of being blacklisted. This is not paranoia, It’s just the way it is for Hollywood Republicans swimming in an ocean of liberals.

“Earth to Robert?”

All eyes are on me. My colleagues are shifting uncomfortably in their super-comfy leather chairs.

Everyone in Hollywood takes it for granted that if you work in Hollywood you are a Democrat. Hollywood people, whose job it is to imagine stuff, find it hard, if not impossible, to imagine a Republican in their midst.

Seriously, the studio exec looks like he’s just had a glimpse of the apocalypse and his head is about to explode.

He’s like: “You are kidding, right?”

I’m totally absorbed in the incredibly complex task of closing my MacBook and shtupping it into my briefcase.

I glance up, all eyes on your faithful blogger.

G-d in heaven, I silently pray, puh-leeese let loose with an earthquake—not massive and corpse strewn, mind you—just awesome enough to send everyone scurrying for their lives and get me the heck out of this totalitarian canyon.

Smiling through a deadly combination of disbelief and rapidly escalating anger: “Robert, this is not a democracy in this room. You don’t get to abstain.”

I love liberals. They’re so not liberal it’s almost a fulfillment of George Orwell’s 1984.

“Look, I don’t discuss politics or religion in business meetings. Sorry.”

Sure, I could say that I’m voting for McCain-Palin, but I don’t feel like playing in their playground. I want to create some simple boundaries.

“Sarah Palin is such a backward step for women,” chimes in a young, slender D-girl. DG is an Ivy League grad, overeducated, overbred and fashionably undernourished. She invariably shows up at meetings poised for the runway in Prada, Armani, Dolce Gabbana, plus a seemingly endless supply of Manolo Blahnik pumps, footwear whose combined cost is more than the GNP of several third world countries.

I shrug, trying to give the impression that I’m way too stupid to process D-girl’s sophisticated political analysis.

Finally, my agent—G-d love him—claps his hands together and all hyper and energized and trying desperately to create a Ho Chi Minh style diversion announces that this is a great script, that the notes are great, that we all have great relationships, that we’re going to make a great movie, and it’s all so, you know, great.

Oddly enough, I don’t feel so great.

In the elevator going down to the parking lot my agent chuckles and calls me a four-letter word. He does this with great affection.

“Why don’t you just give ’em what they want?”

“As Barack Obama once sad: That’s above my pay grade.”

“It’s a good thing you have so much talent or you’d be so dead in this town.”

In this radio interview from 2001, Barack Obama laments the fact that “the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth.”

This is the ideology of the former Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Cuba and every Communist, Socialist sink hole on planet earth. It’s a classic Socialist belief that government should control private property and wealth, that the haves should be compelled by big government to hand over what they have earned to the have-nots—above and beyond taxes.

We will also remind our readers that Obama’s mentor for over 20-years, Jeremiah (“G-d damned America; Israel, that dirty word.”) Wright, advocated this economic ideology when preaching his Black Liberation Theology. And of course, American terrorists William Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn* were and are Communists who openly advocate the redistribution of wealth.

So if Obama is elected here’s what we can expect almost immediately.

1. The Defense budget will be cut by at least 10% and as much as 25%. This will make the Islamic terrorists and Russia very happy.

3. Obama and his radical left friends in the Congress, Conyers, Dodd, Frank, Pelosi, Rangel, Reid, will impose tariffs against our most vital trading partners. Never forget that Obama and the Democrats are owned by the unions. There will be a trade war and domestic prices will shoot shy high.

4. At the same time, Obama will increase taxes for everyone except those who don’t pay Federal taxes.

5. Obama has said he wants to hand over an extra 50 billion dollars to the UN. The Jew-haters who are in the majority of that odious institution can’t wait. That money will buy plenty of weapons with which to kill Jews in Israel and Americans across the globe.

6. Jimmy Carter’s wretched one-term presidency will seem like a stroll in the park.

Here’s the good news:

1. An Obama presidency will be such a massive failure that after his term is over the country will flock back to the Republicans.

2. Hello President Sarah Palin.

*Bernardine Dohrn on the Tate-LaBianca murders: “Dig it. First they [the Manson gang] killed those pigs and then they put a fork in their bellies Wild!”

**********

What’s happening in this terrifying, Orwellian US presidential race is the flip side of the madness that’s been on display since 9/11 itself, when swathes of the UK population decided that ‘America had it coming to it’ because it supported Israel, and that George W Bush was the most dangerous man on the planet. After the Iraq war started this irrationality swelled into pathological proportions on both sides of the Atlantic, when the ‘Bush lied, people died’ narrative fuelled a hatred of Bush and ‘the neocons’ exceeded in its hallucinatory and murderous venom only by the truly deranged way in which the media and intelligentsia systematically either ignored evidence that did not fit this narrative or, even more astoundingly, reported it in such a way that it delivered the opposite of what was actually happening or being said.

In this way not only has history been rewritten, not only have Britain and America been to a greater or lesser extent turned against themselves and demoralised by the propaganda of their mortal enemies recycled as truth by our fifth-column Big Media, but they have been incited to an ugly and dangerous level of irrationality, hatred and hysteria which history tells us presages the twilight of freedom. It is that media class which, in refusing to tell the public what it needs to know about Barack Obama, may now finally install in the White House the man who personifies the repudiation of the American power and western values that the media and left-wing intelligentsia (of which the media is the mouthpiece) have themselves spared no effort to destroy these past seven years.

Now look at this. Back in April, the LA Times ran this story reporting on the going-away party for Rashid Khalidi, Obama’s close friend, who justifies Palestinian violence against Israel and who was leaving for a job in New York. Khalidi is a deeply troubling individual, a former PLO operative and close friend of unreprentant former Weatherman terrorist William Ayers. As I have reported before, in 2000 Khalidi and his wife Mona held a fundraiser for Obama’s unsuccessful congressional bid. The next year, an Arab group whose board was headed by Mona Khalidi received a $40,000 grant from the Woods Fund of Chicago when Obama was on the fund’s board of directors.

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About Me
Robert J. Avrech
Los Angeles, California

I'm an Emmy Award winning screenwriter. I'm also an observant Jew, a religious Zionist, a conservative Republican, and a member of the NRA. I've been writing and producing in Hollywood for over twenty-five years. But the focus of my life is my family: my radiant wife, Karen—with whom I have been in love with since I was nine years-old—and my two daughters, who, thankfully, look like Karen. Not too long ago, we had three children. But our son, Ariel, died at the age of twenty-two from cancer. We miss him terribly. We think about him practically every minute of every day. People tell us that time heals, but Karen and I know this is not true. Time grinds away doing its terrible work. Ariel is gone. Yet absence becomes presence.

Ariel Chaim Avrech, ZT'L, May His Righteous Memory be a Blessing.

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